Stevenson - Tontines in John Street

On Monday 22nd March 2010, we took a comic turn, and discussed The Wrong Box (1889), a novel penned by Robert Louis Stevenson and his step-son Lloyd Osborne, whose plot revolves around the two survivors of a tontine scheme, one of whom (Joseph Finsbury) lives in a gloomy house in John Street, Bloomsbury, with his avaricious relatives. We couldn't resist showing the 1966 film of the book, which stars Tony Hancock and Peter Sellars, as well as Michael Caine, who you can see in my grainy reproduction of the poster. The movie, we all agreed, preserves something of the grotesque dark humour of the original, though the careful geography of Stephenson's book has been dispensed with entirely: instead of employing Bloomsbury among other specifically meaningful places within nineteenth-century London, the film houses the brothers next door to each other in a proto-Wodehousian undefined England. Though not alluded to in the script, the street struck us as being not unlike the Royal Crescent in Bath...